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Blu-ray Discs useful structure to improve efficiency solar cells

Nov

27

2014

The quasi-random nanostructures on the Blu-ray Discs may be used to improve the efficiency of solar cells. If the patterns are applied on the surface of solar cells, light is collected more.

Blu-ray pattern Researchers at the US Northwestern University provided a layer of polymer solar cells of the Blu-raypatroon Jackie Chan’s movie ‘Supercop’. The improvement in light absorption pattern that brought it to the surface, was 21.8 percent, the university announced. “We found that a random pattern or structure works better than any pattern, but the pattern of Blu-ray discs was the best,” says Jiaxing Huang, a professor of materials science and engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science of the University.

It has long been known that improves the application of a pattern on the surface of the solar cell efficiency, because incident light is effectively dispersed. The high degree of compression and fault tolerance that is used when writing data to Blu-ray discs, creates a quasi-random arrangement of pits and silos with feature size of between 150 and 525 nanometers. Those patterns are optimized substantially in accordance with the maker for capturing photons. The researchers claim that no matter what content creates the pattern.

The discovery can potentially provide for a cheaper method to make patterns on efficiency solar cells. The structures could be printed not only on polymer solar cells, but also to solar cells from other materials. The researchers describe their work in the renowned scientific journal Nature.